Are there any ways to approximate university learning experience?

For all the hype about online learning, I find no way of learning most standard academic topics at a rigorous level other than:

1) enrolling in a traditional university with all the cost and bureaucratic nonsense that entails, or

2) patiently working my way through a textbook (or worse, recorded lectures) and scrambling to find decent sets of problems with solutions. It's a lonely endeavour.

MOOCs don’t exist for most topics above a very basic level, and even then, they are typically ghost town outside of a handful of popular subjects.

It would be great to have a way to connect with other people wishing to study at any given time, say, introductory quantum field theory, for exchange of ideas and motivation.